Erin Baker and Sebita Hipwell (pictured above) are just two of the vital Public Sector workers in NSW making a difference to children’s lives at Beverley Park School. But the work they, and hundreds of thousands of other Public Sector workers in Australia, do is being undermined by political opponents.

It wasn’t long ago that, among the cheers on election night in the bayside suburb of Brighton-le-Sands, a commitment was made that privatisation was off the table for the people of NSW.

In 2023, Premier Chris Minns went to the state election vowing he would put a stop to privatisation. On election night, with supremacy over the Coalition in the lower house confirmed, Mr Minns pledged to strike back against the multi-billion dollar sell-offs that had characterised the 12 years of conservative rule in Macquarie Street.

“In hindsight, it was a sure-fire vote-winner,” said PSA CPSU NSW General Secretary Stewart Little. “Privatisation of the state’s public sector departments has failed.

Wherever it has happened in recent years, there has been, at the very least, a sharp drop in customer service, a sharp rise in the price of the service; and at its worst, it has ruined people’s lives.

“So important was the issue to PSA CPSU NSW members and the people who use public sector services – which is everyone in the state – that we approached all major parties and high-profile independent candidates to gauge their stance on privatisation, as well as other issues such as wages.”

However, two years on, the election for the Federal Government looks again like being a tussle between the stability of the Public Sector or the unpredictability of job cuts, privatisation and massive amounts of money thrown at consultants, contractors and, all too often, party donors.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has seen the rhetoric from the United States, where President Donald Trump, through the unelected Elon Musk, has started dismantling the Federal Government.

Suddenly, privatisation was back on the agenda, this time from Canberra, and the Labor Party had a point of difference to campaign on in its search for a second consecutive term.

“Public servants are not statistics: they represent real services,” said the outgoing Minister for the National Disability Insurance Scheme of Australia, Bill Shorten.
The PSA’s Stewart Little agrees.

“This quote shows Mr Shorten has a deep understanding of the public service,” said Mr Little. “And further, love Labor or not, Albanese has a much more profound understanding of what the public service does for the people of this country.”

If elected this year, the Federal Liberal National coalition plans to cut thousands of Australian Public Service jobs. Nationals leader David Littleproud said, “The first thing we’ll do is sack those 36,000 public servants in Canberra.” He was referring to the additional staff the Albanese Government has supposedly employed since June 2022.

In June 2022, just after the coalition left power, the Australian Public Service (APS) bill was $22.8 billion for salaries. Indeed, it has increased to $26.6 billion under Labor.

However, the spending on consultants has been greatly reduced. Under the Liberal National Coalition, the APS spent $21 billion on consultants. And claimed efficiency without owning up to the public that 54,000 full time-equivalent roles were being filled by external workers.

It is little wonder the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) has launched a campaign – Don’t Risk Dutton – focusing on a leader who is proudly contemptuous of the nation’s Public Sector workers toiling away at all levels of government for a better Australia.

The campaign has targeted Opposition leader Peter Dutton. Despite once being employed by the Public Sector, namely the Queensland Police Force, the member for Dickson is on the offensive about his former colleagues. He has stated that the Labor government is spending like a “drunken sailor”, and the public service was now “bloated and inefficient”. It’s an example of “wasteful spending that is out of control”. “We’re not having 36,000 additional public servants in Canberra”.

“In reality, he’s talking like drunken spin doctor,” said Mr Little. “The fact is the majority of the extra staff are working in frontline services in the states, helping people using the National Disability Insurance Scheme, visiting Centrelink, and other government services.

“Cutting public service jobs is an easy go-to to cut government spending. Public servants are easier to think of as numbers, or at least faceless workers. And conservatives persist with the myth that the public service is a clock-on and put your feet up job.

“But in the real world, the public service runs efficiently – it has to – the budgets are finite, and government departments are run transparently; and they provide services people need. So, where will Dutton cut? Health? Education? Disability services? He has made Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price shadow minister for ‘government efficiency’, and stated he will cut diversity and inclusion positions, along with change managers and internal communication specialists. Vague. And more than a little Trumpian.”

Mr Dutton has the support of mega-wealthy donors like Gina Rinehart, who said “we need a USA-style Department of Government Efficiency that delivers action, one that helps to return dollars to our pockets and investment back to Australia,” at an event hosted by resources giant Santos on 22 November 2024.

“The Coalition is riding the wave of right-wing rhetoric,” said Mr Little. “But we are beginning to see what that actually means in practice: essential services get shut down. So, when Ms Rinehart says ‘our pockets’ she means the very few people who do not need any government services.”

If elected, the Liberal National Coalition will cut tens of thousands of public service jobs, only to hand the work over to an army of private sector consultants and contractors, ultimately costing us much more. And cut jobs will always mean cut services.

And the people of NSW have seen all this before.

Privatisation has always been unpopular, even with conservative voters. However, from the 1980s onward, it was a popular tool of governments, left and right, which divested themselves of state-run operations, including airlines, power generators and telecommunications providers.

The NSW Liberal National Coalition, however, amplified the sell-offs to a grotesque level. With previous governments already having privatised Parklea Correctional Centre, the rail link to the airport and setting up the sale of the state’s electricity industry, the Coalition needed to go deeper into the state’s operations to find assets to flog to its mates.

And this was a task they relished. Starting out with the remnants of the state’s power system and the desalination plant in Sydney’s south, the consecutive premierships of Barry O’Farrell, Mike Baird, Gladys Berejiklian and Dominic Perrottet went on to sell off port facilities, the government superannuation provider, disability and home care services and even the land titles service, giving the buyer a cut whenever property in NSW was sold.

The PSA feared Service NSW and General Assistants in schools were at threat.

“Little wonder, when two Liberal candidates in the south of the state said they’d happily sell off our water, that the people of NSW decided they had had enough,” said Mr Little.
Redbridge election analyst Kosmos Samaras said campaigns, led by the PSA CPSU NSW, against further privatisations swayed many voters. Mr Samaras said surprise wins for Labor, such as the seat of Camden in Sydney’s affluent southwestern outskirts, were the result of unions alerting voters to the perils of further sell-offs.

In 2024, opponents of privatisation received welcome news. Control of the gaol in the Riverina town of Junee, which had been in private hands since its construction in the 1990s, was to be handed to Corrective Services NSW (CSNSW). During the announcement, Premier Minns said CSNSW was likely to take over the running of Parklea Gaol from 2026.

Keen gardeners would know, however, that problem weeds are hard to eliminate. And privatisation is yet to be completely uprooted from NSW. Privatisation continues to cause serious damage to people’s lives, and the PSA has been forced to roll out a state-wide campaign in response.

In the NSW Child Protection area privatisation of services has seen the Department of Communities and Justice no longer monitor the wellbeing of many children in Out of Home Care (OOHC).

This has meant the Department doesn’t have the information needed to meet its legislative responsibility to ensure children receive such care and protection as is necessary for their safety, welfare and wellbeing. Privatisation has led to 471 children living in costly and damaging environments such as hotels and motels for months or years at a time at a cost of $300 million per annum, rather than with foster parents or in group homes as was the system before privatisation. The PSA knows of one child who cost taxpayers $1.2 million to be put up in hotels and motels.

It was only a strong campaign by the PSA alerting the public to this issue that forced the NSW Government to start to claw back Child Protection services to the state.
One contractor that did well from the taxpayer is BailSafe , which provided ankle monitors for Community Corrections. The PSA’s position on keeping monitoring as a public function was proven when it was revealed BailSafe had gone bust without informing the NSW Government. The result was offenders in the community wearing useless ankle monitors for months.

Corrective Services NSW has been engaging in work which should be performed by trained and vetted public servants and inmates as part of work programs; and not only are the companies greatly profiting from this, but they are also allowing the Department to address understaffing issues rather than employ public servants. A facilities contractor is performing work, and charging greatly inflated fees, for jobs that should be done by approved inmates under programs which give the inmates experience and skills which they will require when released. The company is invoicing for jobs that they simply should not even be performing.

The Coalition’s 2021 sell-off of Sydney’s bus services has predictably turned out to be late-running mess that the NSW Labor government will now need to manage, using taxpayer funding to do it. There is simply no metric that could be used to say that selling off the busses has improved the services in any way.

Labor premier Chris Minns used the stopping of privatisation as one of his platforms in the lead up to the NSW elections which brought him to power. And while the Minns government is not selling off or privatising government services or departments, some of the CEOs and senior managers he inherited are pursuing a type of surreptitious privatisation. Using loopholes, or just plain flouting employment regulations to have privateers run sections of the public service. We are seeing unprecedented examples of this in Corrective Services NSW, and, surprisingly, at the devastated Powerhouse Museum.

Even more surreptitious privatisation is going on at one the state’s most loved cultural institutions. While the Liberals all but destroyed the Powerhouse Museum, Labor have done scarcely anything to reverse the damage, and have in fact left the Liberal-appointed CEO in place with barely a change to her remit.

The curatorial department at the Powerhouse Museum is traditionally responsible for building the museum’s collection and developing its exhibitions. The team consists of approximately 20 staff.
Delegates have long pushed for more human resources; however, there has never been funding in the budget to expand staffing. Many curatorial positions have been lost over the years to retirement (and the roles have not been re-filled), redundancies, and staff moving to other institutions because of the toxic culture at Powerhouse.

All of the current programs being run by the museum are ‘curated by’ and authored by, people who are not members of staff at the museum. They are either associates, residents, or contractors. The residents, associates, and contracted writers are not employed by the state government – like the curatorial teams is – instead, they report directly to the CEO, or one of her executives.

“Our members are proud of the work they do,” said Mr Little. “An attack on any public sector, state or federal, is an attack on the great work our members perform.
“When you go to the polls, think about what the parties say about who does the work that keeps our country wealthy, safe and strong: Public Sector workers or unaccountable contractors and other outsourcers.

“Public service matters, be it state or federal. Let’s make sure voters this year know it, too.”